Software Development Manager - Quote

Price Service is a HTTP API handling pricing and promotions across all of Tesco’s channels and is of central importance to Tesco’s strategic plans to better serve 28 million shoppers each week in the UK, and more around the globe. The impact of the team’s work on Price Service is visible through Tesco's tills, websites and mobile apps - it is rare to find a job with this level of challenge and impact. The HTTP API is being built for consumption on the open internet, to enable future innovation in the wider world.  To do so, the engineering team has to tackle hard distributed systems problems at scale, to ensure high availability and performance. CAP theorem is a regular and very practical topic of conversation within the team!

The service is built with Java, Vert.x, RxJava, Groovy, Couchbase and Kafka, among other technologies. It runs on AWS & Azure with fully automated testing in a continuous deployment pipeline. The team works according to Agile principles, adapting Kanban and other techniques as appropriate to succeed.

The team is humble and supportive of each other and highly collaborative both internally and with other teams, with pairing a common occurrence and all code is reviewed via Github.

As a Software Development Manager, your primary responsibility is to build and maintain a passionate, engaged, and effective development team of engineers. You'll do this by taking a deep interest in the people that report to you, making sure they are happy, motivated, and challenged in what they are doing, guiding them to reach pragmatic technical solutions, and keep yourself close to the code (without becoming a blocker). You'll also take ownership when things go wrong but celebrate success collectively and, in short, act as a multiplier of your team’s effectiveness. Specifically, you will:

• Foster the careers of the engineers reporting into you by finding opportunities for growth, coaching, addressing concerns, and if necessary, implementing performance management.
• Grow the capability of Tesco Technology as a whole by becoming involved in our engineering hiring and being passionate about building successful and diverse teams.
• Work closely with Product Management to identify and minimise risk within an outcome and help prioritise and evolve a workable technical solution ready for delivery.
• Represent Quote within wider technical discussions across different business groups, constantly broadening your understanding of our technology landscape so as to increase the effectiveness of your contribution.
• Take ownership for the delivery of specific outcomes, or work across wider groups in conjunction with programme management to deliver more significant outcomes. Drive us to constantly improve quality.
• Take ownership of non-functional outcomes of Tesco Connect features, including performance, availability, reliability, and security.
• Continually look for means to evolve and improve our technology, processes, and practices.

• Previous experience with management of software engineering teams of 5-15 people in size. 
• Hands-on experience in development of Restful API services and distributed systems that work at scale. 
• Problem solving, analysis and computational skills. You are comfortable designing systems and reasoning about them. When tackling problems, you take a thorough and logical approach to solving them and retaining ownership through to resolution. 

•  Customer focus. You can find the right balance between outcome delivery and technical excellence. You place the needs of our customers above the needs of you and the team. 

• Written and verbal communication skills. You can communicate effectively and efficiently taking into account the nature of your audience. 

• Experience with Java 8+ is a must. 
• Experience with cloud platform(s) (e.g. AWS, Azure, etc.)
• Experience with both SQL/NoSQL databases
• Experience using Spring.

We offer excellent benefits that help make Tesco a great place to work!  These include but are not limited to:

• Annual bonus scheme
• Holiday starting at 25 days plus a personal day (and bank holidays)
• Great colleague discounts and deals, saving you money on everyday purchases, utility bills for the home and more
• Retirement savings plan – save between 4% and 7.5% and Tesco will match your contribution
• Buy as you earn and Save as you earn share schemes
• Opportunities to get on – take advantage of our ongoing learning opportunities and award-winning training to help you achieve the career you want

Our vision at Tesco is to become every customer’s favourite way to shop, whether they are at home or out on the move.  Our core purpose is “Serving our customers, communities and planet a little better every day”.  Serving means more than a transactional relationship with our customers.  It means acting as a responsible and sustainable business for all stakeholders, for the communities we are part of, and for the planet.

We are proud to have an inclusive culture at Tesco where everyone truly feels able to be themselves.  At Tesco, we not only celebrate diversity, but recognise the value and opportunity it brings.  We’re committed to creating a workplace where differences are valued, and make sure that all colleagues are given the same opportunities.  We’re a big business with diverse working patterns and many business areas which means that we can find something that works for you.  Everyone is welcome at Tesco.

We have recently announced that we are moving to a more blended working week – combining office and remote working.  Our offices continue to be where we connect, collaborate and innovate.  Talk to us about how this can work for you.

Note: Should you be successful in your application, your employment will be subject to and conditional upon you providing your bank account details on your agreed start date.